What I did in the game: LV99 party of 4 and every Scenarios completed.
The One Picture I have taken: Party selection screen.
I finally managed to complete a version of Sorcerian that is casual enough for me to get through! For those who don't know, Sorcerian was an old japanese PC game from Falcom (Ys, Legend of Heroes), and the 5th game in the Dragon Slayer series (which include Dragon Slayer, Xanadu, Romancia, Legacy of the Wizard/Drasle Family. The 6th entry, The Legend of Heroes, will become its own sub-series). The concept of the game is cool. Create a party of 4 characters, and then use them in a series of unique scenarios that are played like a side-scrolling action RPG (a la Ys III) where you need to also do some platforming here and there. The amazing part is that they were releasing many expansion packs at the time, and you could always use your party in all of these, making them grow over the course of them. Problem was for me that in the original PC-88 version (which released on Switch through EGG Console), the party management was cryptic, and worst of all, your characters were actually aging! So at one point, they would actually die, transmitting some stuff to the next generations. Still, the fact that we had to restart new characters was a MAJOR turn off for me. So I gave up on the original.
But, overtime, Sorcerian got ported/remade on many different platforms, and one of them was for old Japanese cellphones. Called Advanced Sorcerian, it took all 15 Base game scenarios (along a new Tutorial and the unlockable secret one), and added two expansions with 5 scenarios each: Sengoku Sorcerian and Pyramid Sorcerian. The great thing with this version is that while it's still a choppy in its gameplay, being on an old cellphone, it streamlined a LOT of things to make the experience more enjoyable (at least for me). Gone are the cryptic character customizations. Now you just gain XP and Gold like a good old RPG, and you just level up your characters and buy new equipment. You characters also dont age. You can keep them until the end, and level them up to 99. And finally, even in japanese, menu navigations was just made more basic, so you can go straight to the 2D side-scrolling action.
I wanted to play this version, and what do you know, in Japan, G-Mode is doing a great job of archiving all those lost Japanese cellphone games under the G-Mode Archives umbrella. And Sorcerian was their 30th release! So if you have a Nintendo Japanese account, you can play it on your Switch (it's also dirt cheap, like $5 or something). And even without any knowledge of Japanese, it's quite easy to play by just going everywhere, triggering everything until you can move on (and in this day and age, a simple use of Google Lens on your cellphone can help you if you really need translation for some parts). I completed every scenarios of the game and it truly was a blast to play. I feel like I can check off this part of Falcom history off my list now. If you like 2D Side-Scrolling Action-RPG and can tolerate the fact that there's no english version for this, I highly recommend to try Advanced Sorcerian. Skip the original except if you have a lot of patience.
To conclude, I also did a completion video showing all 3 Final Scenarios in the game with my LV99 party. If you want to have a taste of the game, you can check it below:
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